A DEATH IS A DEATH.

You stand outside your father's
bedroom, your hand hovering over the doorknob, uncertain whether
you ought to open it or walk away and leave it for another ten
minutes. You listen, your ear close to the wooden panel of the
door, but hear nothing. You put your hand around the doorknob and
touch it hesitantly. What if he's sitting up in bed and staring
at me with those deep dark eyes of his? You ask yourself. Closing
your eyes, you try to imagine how he was when you left him
fifteen minutes before. However, the image is overcome by your
fear that he has somehow managed to survive your attempt of
suffocating him with the pillow, and is waiting for you, either
in bed or behind the door.

"And I want some warm soup," your
father had asked earlier that morning when you had entered the
bedroom and he was lying back on his pillows and staring at you
with his deep hard eyes. "And try not to allow lumps in it. I
hate lumps," he added a few moments later. You had entered the
room and gone to the bed to tidy up his blankets and covers, and
he had grabbed your hand and squeezed it with that spiteful way
he had, even when you were a girl and you had offended him, or
simply because he was in a bad mood, and you were the nearest and
youngest. You had pulled away your hand and stared at it. Red
marks were around your wrist where he had grabbed you so tightly.
Even as a sick and weak man, he had that strength of will to hurt
and cause pain to others.

Taking a deep intake of breath, you
open the door slowly. Your heart is beating so hard that you feel
it hitting against your breast. You look towards the bed
expecting him to be sitting up and glaring at you, but he isn't.
He's lying on his back with the pillow still over his face and
motionless. You hesitate and stand by the door. What if it's just
him trying to catch me out? you muse, standing still with your
hands gripping each other anxiously. You wait and stare. The
clock on the bedside cabinet ticks softly. There is no other
sound. Even the birds outside the window have stopped their
singing. You move closer and look down at the pillow. Your
father's hands are still curled up as they were when you had left
the room fifteen minutes before. Even though it all looks as it
was when you left the room after holding the pillow over his
head, he could still be pretending, you think, hesitating over
the pillow, fearing that he may suddenly open his eyes and make a
grab for you. Your breathing becomes heavy and you sense your
body perspire. Dampness clings under your arms.

�

�

You lower your hands slowly and
remove the pillow, expecting your father to suddenly grab at you,
and see his eyes glare at you as he often did if you had not
pleased him for some reason or other. However, once the pillow is
removed you see that he not pretending at all. His eyes are open,
but blankly staring at the ceiling.

His pallor is off-white with a hint
of yellowness about his drawn cheeks. His lips are parted as if
he was about to say something, but nothing had come, only a
stillness. You hold the pillow away from the body and stand back.
Even now, you still fear he will turn his head and look at you
with those eyes that as a child you feared so much.

If your mother had not died when
you were nine years old, she would have stood up to him and not
let him treat you the way he did. Or that is what you always
believed and told yourself as a child after he had beaten you, or
had locked you in the cupboard under the stairs, or outside in
the summer house where you feared the spiders, and other things
that seemed to move in the dark. Your brother, Gavin had fared no
better, but he was a male and eventually had managed to leave the
house and go to war and get himself killed in Africa somewhere.
However, your mother, whom you barely remembered, was your
saviour even though she had ill served you by dying as she did.
Suicide was not a word you understood much as a child, and when
you did understand it, you tried to forget it, and imagine it had
been a mistake, or even that your father had murdered her and
pretended she had committed suicide.

You put the pillow on the chair by
the bed. Your father has made no turn of his head or moved a
muscle in anyway at all. He is motionless as if made of wax. You
move closer and sniff him. There is a sickly smell about him, a
smell that has lingered for weeks now, and has made you tread
entering the room, because it made you feel nauseous and giddy.
Hesitantly you place your hand on his brow. It feels strange. You
have not touched his brow since you were a child, and he had
asked you to play at being a nurse, and had grabbed you and
squeezed you and said that he knew you only wanted to poison him
and as you think of that time, you remove your hand and wipe it
on your dress. Your father's hands are laying claw like on the
blanket. Harmless now. Nothing about them can harm you anymore.
You want to squeeze them tight has he done and make red marks on
them as he had done to your hands, but you don't. You lift them
and put them under the bed covers out of sight. They seem so
light, so feather like as if he were a bird no longer able to
fly.

"Dead," you whisper. The word seems
to linger about the room like a bird of prey.

You walk around the bed, not taking
your eyes off your father as you go. Once you reach the other
side of the bed, you look at him from the other angle, stooping
level with the bed. You stretch out your right hand and touch his
left cheek. Your fingers run slowly down the skin and then up
again.

Bristles make his cheek rough and
manly.

The moustache, which you trimmed
the other day, seems in need of trimming again, but you won't
anymore. He can go as he is, you muse, withdrawing your fingers
and wiping them on the bed cover. "You can't harm me anymore,"
you say bitterly. "Can't make me cry anymore. I won't cry at your
funeral." Your words linger about your head and seem to crowd you
in. What now? you muse moving around the bed again and standing
by the bedside cabinet. Call Doctor Vine, you tell yourself. He
will not be surprised. He will come and that will be that. Yes,
call him, you say to yourself, phone him now. And picking up the
pillow on the chair by the bed, you leave the room and shut the
door behind you with a softness that comes from
habit.

"Your mother is dead, Lizabeth"
your father had said the night after her body had been discovered
hanging from a tree in the garden. "We will not mention her
anymore. She no longer exists," he had said to you and
Gavin.

"I want to see her," you had said.
Gavin said nothing; he stared at your father and waited to see
what would happen to you by your outburst.

Your father had grabbed you,
dragged you out into the garden, and locked you in the
summerhouse all night with the spiders and other noises that
seemed to echo all around you in the dark. Gavin had said nothing
and never did mention your mother again. But you did. At least
you did to yourself. You tried to conjure up her image time after
time, until gradually she became just a blurred and faint image,
and then you couldn't remember what she looked like at all, and
went on thinking of her out until it became pointless, and you
slowly stopped, and she became just another face forgotten,
amongst those your father had dismissed, or made disappear from
your sight.

The doctor leans over your father
and examines him in silence. You stand by the door and watch him
moving his hands and touching your father's body. You have not
seen your father's naked body so blatantly before. Its thinness
and whiteness brings to you just how mortal your father really
was. Yet even now, as the doctor moves the body over, you have a
deep fear that your father will suddenly wake from his silence
and fight back against his death.

"Was he like this when you found
him?" Doctor Vine asks.

"Yes," you lie, looking at the
doctor's back, at the way his head tilts to one side as if he
were deciding something that is puzzling him. "Is anything
wrong?" you ask, moving forward towards the bed.

"Were the hands beneath the blanket
when you found him?" the doctor asks.

"No," you reply, standing just
behind the doctor." I put them inside after I found
him."

The doctor nods and stands back. He
turns and looks at you with a steady professional gaze. "I'm
surprised he has lasted this long," he says. "I'll think his
heart just grew too tired, Elizabeth." He looks back at the body
of your father and sighs.

"Shall I contact the undertakers?"
you ask simply.

"Yes," he replies, turning back and
looking at you. His eyes have a sense of pity in them as if he
had a suspicion that something was not quite right, but wasn't
sure what it was. "I'll write out the death certificate. You'll
need that before anything can be done."

You nod your head and then over
towards the body now covered by the blanket. You feel a sense of
emptiness enter you and an emotion you never thought you would
have. The doctor places a hand on your shoulder and taps it a
couple of times.

"Time will heal the pain of your
loss," he says, moving his hand back by his side. "I remember
your mother's death," he adds, looking back at the body once
more. "Untimely. You were so young. Your father was not an easy
man." The doctor pauses. He turns back to you again. "Sometimes a
death is a death for more than the person who has died. Others
die a little at the same time. I think your father began to die
the day your mother died."

You didn't think you would ever
feel for your father enough to bring tears to your eyes. You say
nothing, but wipe your eyes on a small handkerchief. After a
touch of his hand on your head, he turns and walks out of the
room. You listen as he walks down the stairs and out of the front
door. Silence. You look at the body of your father and wipe your
eyes once more. "Now I can live," you murmur, moving towards the
door. "A death is a death, but your death gives me life," you
utter bitterly. You give the body a last stare and then you close
the door behind you and begin to walk down the stairs. However,
half way down you turn round and see a woman standing by the
bedroom door. She is smiling; just like your mother use to smile
as she kissed you goodnight, those long almost forgotten years
ago, before the dark ages came.